Designers today are caught between shunning redline specs and being overwhelmed to learn new skills to bring their designs to life. Out of this tension comes design systems – not only a more efficient way to design, but a better a way to bridge the gap between design and engineering.

In this talk, Mike Dick, Design Systems Lead at Survey Monkey shares his experience leading design systems for companies like Twitch and Quora, and a deep dive on how SurveyMonkey's design system was built to empower design and engineering teams to come together to refresh their 20-year-old product.

Benjamin’s talk touches on the internationalization and localization of design elements, and how might we design with consistency for multiple interface targets like Android, iOS, Virtual Reality, or even Natural Language interfaces. He’ll dive into how to apply the same techniques and principles to design a chatbot, or a telephone autoresponder, or confidently design for 90 different languages.

In this talk, Benjamin shared some examples of how Airbnb is already doing this, some predictions of where this is going, and wrap up with some practical takeaways.

About the Speaker

Benjamin Wilkins is a founding member of the Design Technology team at AirBnB, working on scaling design through systems, tools, and emerging technology. Prior to working at AirBnB, he worked cross-functionally with a number of early stage startups before partnering to start This is After, a design collective focused on generative design and identities.

Every team is different and has different needs. Additionally, products go through multiple phases of development so teams working effectively in one phase may struggle in a new phase.

Jennifer Lin, Engineering Manager at Instagram shares how agile retrospectives are a powerful tool to iterating towards a happy, productive, and efficient product teams. She gives examples of how she has used retrospectives to run extremely different teams as well as carrying a single team through multiple phases of product development.

By the end of the talk, you will understand how to use retrospectives to receive regular feedback on how to iterate on processes your team will actually appreciate.

There are often multiple variations of button styles and hundreds of lines of code written by multiple contributors before a company starts to build design systems, and few companies start with a dedicated full-time team. So when you do get to focus on systems, what's the most valuable way to spend your time?

Diana will be sharing practical examples on where to begin to set up a design system, what to prioritize, and how to make a big impact to customers and colleagues, to help you introduce systems that bring order to chaos.

About the speaker

Diana is a product designer based in Brooklyn, NY, and organizer for the NYC Design Systems Coalition. She works for GitHub and leads their design systems team- the team responsible for building and maintaining GitHub's CSS framework, Primer. Before joining GitHub, Diana helped re-design Etsy’s seller tools, taught new designers how to push code, and was part of a small team that rebuilt the style guide.